Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday March 18, 2014 @05:54PM
from the year-of-linux-on-the-gamebox dept.

jones_supa writes "More great news for Linux gamers: following the footsteps of Steam, GOG.com is preparing delivery of Linux games. They expect to start doing so this autumn. The officially supported distributions will be Ubuntu and Mint. Right now, they are performing testing on various configurations, training up their teams on Linux-speak, and generally preparing for the rollout of at least 100 titles — DRM-free, as usual. This will update some of the catalog's existing games with a Linux port and bring new ones to the collection. Further information on specific games is yet not known, but GOG invites fans and customers to their community wishlist for discussion."

PlayOnLinux can already access your GOG account and install many Windows games automatically and run them using WINE.

Here's a good tip for older games that use DOS4GW.EXE: download the GPL'ed binary from http://dos32a.narechk.net/inde... [narechk.net] and re-name it DOS4GW.EXE, then substutite it for the original. You'll find a noticable improvement in game performance, even using WINE o DOSBOX.

Partially because it's now supported as in they'll give you help if something goes awry and will test the releases before claiming they work on Linux.

The bigger deal though is that it gives more visibility to Linux users. Buying a Windows version of a game and running it on Linux does very, very little for Linux,but buying and running a Linux version is something that developers notice. Even more so if people refuse to buy the Windows version and opt for the Linux version instead.

Funny. It would seem IBM has no problem with their DB/2 UDB releases, which run on every version of Linux I've thrown them at over the past 5-6 years. Sure you have to install some optional modules on some platforms, but how much more complex do you get than a database server?

Shame on the other database vendors for not being able to do the same. Currently DB/2 UDB 10.2 is the only commercial database I was able to install on Debian. Clearly it can be done, but the other vendors seem to take the "RHEL or the highway" lazy approach to "Linux" support.